Last Day_CineManila International Film Festival 2011

Today is the last day of the on-going Cine Manila International Film Festival. Unfortunately, I do not have enough time to watch many good films from other countries. But of the few that I have seen I liked the South Korean films — POETRY by Chang-dong Lee, and BLIND, a suspense-thriller film by Anh Sanh-hoon and NIGHTFISHING by Park Chan-Wook. Because of wrong info re projection time, I missed watching Brillante Mendoza’s film in QUATTRO. I only saw probably the last five or 10 minutes of the film. Stanley Kwan’s film was of the lot most well-thought of. Last night, I saw THIS IS NOT A FILM by Jafar Panahi. Very personal. Quite interesting. Defied the usual docu form, that’s why the title. The viewers had a peek of a day in his life…on how Jafar lives as a “banned” filmmaker in Iran. [Hope I find our photo with Mr. Jafar when he attended the CIFF some years back].

This afternoon, I am sked to watch Rey Ventura’s docu, DEKASEGI [The Migrants / Dayo], a film on TNTs in Japan. I have read some of Rey’s books. If on printed form he was successful in making the readers “participate” while reading his books on the same subject because of the richness of details, texture and drama, I do expect that in documentary form the viewer’s heart will most likely sink. I haven’t seen any of his docus but based on his writing style, I expect a very interesting and engrossing docu film. Rey, is by the way, the co-writer of Kingpin Asiong. We worked together with Tikoy in Pagsanjan for that film. Rey wrote the needed sequences for the day while Tikoy was directing in the set. My role was to help in restructuring the film, prepared storyboards for the sked sequences, if not, shotlists. For a break, we ate halo-halo near the Pagsanjan bridge.

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